Opinion: Nintendo 3DS Is a Last-Gen Game Machine

Did you hear the one about the new portable game machine that had everybody on Earth falling all over themselves to praise it? It wowed gamers with graphics that looked almost literally unbelievable. It boasted every popular game franchise, from every major software publisher. And if you harbored any misgivings about its giant $250 price tag, you could rest assured that the handheld also benefitted from the ironclad backing of the most powerful gaming company on the planet.

Yes, Sony’s PlayStation Portable had everything going for it when it was released in Japan in late 2004. But that didn’t stop the PSP from getting steamrolled by cheaper competition.

Six years (and a total reversal of fortunes for Sony and Nintendo) later, the next generation of handheld gaming will begin next month when Nintendo 3DS is released in Japan. Having played with the 3-D handheld at E3, I can testify that the 3DS is a fantastic game machine.

In a way, it’s classic Nintendo, introducing a new wrinkle that competitors may not be able to copy easily. Like the original DS’ touchscreen and Wii’s motion controls, the 3DS’ autostereoscopic display could prove revolutionary.

Looking at the 3DS for the first time, I couldn’t believe my eyes: The games were in 3-D, no glasses required. I was ready to fork over $250 on the spot. I’m sure everyone at that press conference felt roughly the same way. Certainly every industry executive and analyst I spoke to, at E3 and later at the Tokyo Game Show, seemed to think Nintendo had hit a grand slam.

Nobody offered a single word of criticism of 3DS.

The view after Nintendo’s 3DS briefing in New York City this Wednesday didn’t seem to have changed. “Everything with the 3DS is really impressive,” said Jesse Divnich, vice president of analyst services for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, to Wired.com after the event. “I have no problem saying that the 3DS will be the entertainment product of 2011.”

What bothers me is that this was precisely the mood of the game industry prior to the launch of Sony’s ill-fated PSP in 2004. People were drooling over Ridge Racer‘s graphics and had decided that Sony’s handheld, so obviously superior to the DS, was the final nail in Nintendo’s coffin. Believing that the PSP would be anything other than an unqualified success amounted to heresy.

Practically everyone turned out to be dead wrong then. How can we be so confident now?

Sony has sold more than 60 million PSPs since 2004, less than half the 135 million Nintendo DS units moved. To which number will 3DS sales be closer in six years?Image: Sony

The Best Game Machine of 2004

The reason I find myself not fully on board with 3DS isn’t merely a reaction to the utter lack of skepticism from many corners of the industry. It’s because 3DS seems in some ways to be a last-gen product with a pretty new coat of paint. In PSP’s case, the graphics blinded people to the platform’s weaknesses. In the case of 3DS, the 3-D may be doing the same thing. And the world might be surprised when cheaper, more accessible competitors eat into Nintendo’s dominance.

Earlier this month in Tokyo, members of the public got their hands on 3DS for the first time. Nintendo released loads of information about the device at that time, but something major didn’t get a cursory mention: downloadable games.

At Nintendo’s U.S. press briefing Wednesday, we found out why. The 3DS will not have a downloadable games store — one of the basic features of the current Nintendo DSi hardware — at the time of its March 27 launch in the United States. When pressed by Wired.com’s reporter, Nintendo representatives refused to say when the “eShop” might arrive through a firmware update. (Note: See our update below.)

It is inarguable that digital distribution is the direction in which videogames are swiftly moving. You can’t find an industry pundit who doesn’t believe that Nintendo’s biggest threat is Apple, not Sony. In a New York Times article earlier this year, analysts agreed that the cheaper iPhone was “killing” the market for Nintendo DS, but disagreed sharply on whether the 3DS’ 3-D screen would prove sufficiently amazing to distract players from more convenient, less expensive iPhone and Android gaming.

Nintendo says its more robust platforms are the only place to get substantial games like those in the Legend of Zelda series. Roughly speaking, this is true. But even players like me who love big-budget gaming are dropping more and more of our (completely inelastic) free time into iPhone play. Just because you like Nintendo’s lineup doesn’t mean you can’t be seduced by the cheap, frictionless allure of smartphone gaming.

What Apple is doing to Nintendo is in great part what Nintendo did to Sony — finding some surprise hits with low-budget games on a cheaper platform built around disruptive technology. I don’t expect Nintendo to throw open the doors of its eShop to every weekend tinkerer, but I did expect the 3DS to launch with it.

When will games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Super Street Fighter IV 3D be available in the Nintendo 3DS download store? Not at launch. Probably never.Images: Nintendo

Nintendo’s Disappointing Download History

Nintendo’s download stores for Wii and DSi are the worst of the major gaming platforms: They are difficult to navigate and offer very few demo versions. Games are tied to a single console and are nontransferable. Nintendo barely promotes the available games. Accordingly, sales are lower than expected.

“We cannot say that [we] have provided the users with a sufficiently easy and accessible interface, and we were not able to run the optimal shops which have both abilities to promote and sell the products in one place,” admitted Nintendo President Satoru Iwata at a press conference last year. At the New York City briefing, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime showed a video of the new store, which will feature much-needed upgrades like video trailers and demo versions.

But talk is cheap. Where’s the beef? Why won’t this feature be ready for launch? If I were an indie developer looking to make small 3-D games right now, I’d be worried that by not having the store preinstalled on the platform, Nintendo is limiting its audience to those who download the firmware upgrade. Does Nintendo grok that downloads are, increasingly, the way consumers want to buy games? Sometimes it seems like the company is still just idly toying with the idea, while continuing to throw the vast majority of its efforts behind the moribund $50 game-in-a-box business.

Electronic Entertainment Design and Research’s Divnich says Nintendo’s slowness in getting its download store online could reflect the fact that the company knows sales are weak and wants to take its time and do it right.

“I think Nintendo is … really making sure their ducks are in a row before they launch in an area in which there is obviously stiff competition, where Apple has set the bar for downloads and community games,” Divnich said. “I think Nintendo would be setting themselves up for failure if they rushed into this market.”

Nintendo will surely get its downloadable business into shape sometime this year. But when it does launch the eShop, I will be very surprised if the company takes the basic step of offering consumers a choice as to whether they want to download games or buy them on a cartridge. You can buy Sony’s biggest PSP games like God of War: Ghosts of Sparta through direct download. Think you’ll be able to download Kid Icarus: Uprising? Ever?

Nintendo 3DS seems like a last-generation game console with a prettier screen.

3DS does contain some forward-thinking ideas. But in large part, it seems like a last-generation game console with a prettier screen.

Let’s talk about that screen. Staring into it right now is like looking at magic. It is literally jaw-dropping in the sense that your mouth will hang slackly open for a couple of seconds. People will pass it around, and everyone that tries it will want to buy a 3DS.

How long will that last? Once I get my 3DS home and start playing it in earnest, how long will it take before the 3-D display is no longer fascinating but expected? Will I be so permanently enthralled that I refuse to play any game that is not in 3-D, or will it only take a few months before the launch goggles come off and 3-D is just a tangential benefit?

With PSP, the shine came off pretty fast. Most of those people who believed it would be the last portable gaming system they’d ever need eventually ended up glued to their DS instead. Pretty graphics are a plus, but they don’t automatically trump everything else.

In some ways, 3DS seems like a move away from the values that put Nintendo back on top: inexpensive hardware with low power consumption. It will be the most expensive portable machine the company has ever made ($250) with the lowest battery life (between three and five hours, according to Nintendo’s estimates).

And even if the 3-D display turns out to be a “must-have” feature that gamers refuse to compromise on (as I am sure Nintendo’s president will argue in his upcoming Game Developers Conference keynote), how long before Apple uses this technology for the iPhone? What if Sony’s next PSP also uses a 3-D screen? How long before autostereoscopy becomes a commodity?

Certainly, 3DS is not the PSP. PSP’s design was almost entirely antagonistic to the manner in which people use portable game machines. Sony’s belief was evidently that if the graphics were nice enough, nobody would mind that it was effectively impossible to just grab the thing off your dresser, take it outside, turn it on, make some actual progress in a game, then click it off as soon as the bus arrived.

Instead, PSP was saddled with ridiculous game load times, an operating system that took far too long to boot up and shut down, a vampire battery that drained the system completely if it sat idle for a few days and a never-ending parade of required firmware updates that took hours to complete.

After many revisions and software tweaks, PSP has made some significant improvements. But it was fundamentally broken when it launched in a way that 3DS will not be. 3DS will be a well-designed piece of hardware, fun to play with, the sort of thing that makes you want to pick it up. Nintendo’s track record is almost impeccable in this regard.

Also, 3DS is unique among its peers for more reasons than the 3-D display. Six years on, the signature two-screen, touch-panel design has not yet been exceeded or even copied. Many iPhone games have very clever and intuitive control schemes that use the touch screen, but certain types of games just need buttons.

Nintendo may be downplaying (or ignoring) the sort of online services that its peers are pushing, but it’s attempting to increase the “stickiness” of its games using some clever and unique types of connectivity. The StreetPass feature, which allows a 3DS in sleep mode to transfer data automatically if it comes within range of someone else’s 3DS, could be a sleeper hit. Ditto the PlayCoins system, in which users are rewarded with coins to spend in game titles simply by being active and walking around with their 3DS.

Will the Nintendo 3DS be disruptive enough to stave off smartphone competitors? Only time will tell.Photo: Jason Schreier/Wired.com

What Will Probably Happen

Ever since the cautionary tale of the PSP, I’ve been skeptical whenever game industry watchers line up in universal praise of anything. It’s not that I have a contrarian streak. It’s because when everybody seems to be on board with a new product, that means it is too understandable to them: It’s exactly like what is popular now, but better, therefore it could not possibly fail.

But that’s not what succeeds in a fast-changing industry like videogames. Disruptive products succeed. And nobody sees them coming, because they’re so different that the establishment doesn’t understand their appeal. This is the lesson of the “blue ocean” that Nintendo kept hammering back when it was the plucky underdog. Now, Nintendo is the establishment. With 3DS, I don’t know if the company is looking to open up more blue ocean or just defend the great big one it’s already got, which is starting to turn a little pinkish if not blood red.

What is all but certain is that Nintendo’s momentum coming off the ridiculous success of DS, coupled with the wonderful novelty of the 3DS display and the handheld’s strong software lineup, will cause the 3DS to fly off shelves at launch, spread like wildfire this year and be the hottest Christmas present of 2011.

But what happens then? Where will 3DS sales figures be trending in two or three years, once Apple and other smartphone makers have introduced their own hardware innovations and come up with new ways of siphoning gamers’ cash and attention, a few dollars and a few minutes at a time?

Update, 1.28.11: Today, Nintendo finally gave a direct answer: The 3DS eShop will launch in May, three months after the Japanese launch of the console.

Update, 1.21.11: Since the publication of this story, some reports have said that the firmware update containing the eShop and browser would be available the day of the 3DS launch.

Although Nintendo said to Wired.com at the New York City event that the store would launch later, we got this response from Nintendo of America’s Charlie Scibetta when we asked for clarification today:

“Games and services offered by Nintendo can vary by region. Nintendo of America will release additional information about Nintendo eShop, including timing, content and pricing, at a later date.”

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